More than 1.8 million students graduate from college in 2017. While it’s a momentous achievement, many graduates will walk away with significant student loan debt. Though keeping up with monthly payments can be difficult, knowing how to budget for them can be an even bigger obstacle.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and don’t know how to begin managing your loans, your credit report can be an essential tool. Here’s how your credit report can help you take control of your debt.

What’s in Your Credit Report?

Lenders use your credit report to make decisions on your reliability and financial stability. They look at your report to evaluate whether to offer you a car loan, mortgage or a new credit card. However, your credit report is an invaluable source of information for you too, especially if you have student loans.

2 Ways Your Credit Report Can Help You Manage Your Loans

When you’re in school and take out federal or private student loans, it’s easy to lose track of who your lenders are or how much you borrowed — especially if you don’t have to start repaying them yet.

To make things more difficult, your debt can sometimes transfer to a new loan servicer. If that happens, you’ll have to make payments on a different website and you’ll have a new account. That’s where your credit report comes in handy. You can use it to locate your loans and their current status in the following ways:

Identify your loan servicer: If you aren’t sure who your loan servicer is, use your credit report to identify who manages your loans. Your credit report will list all the institutions behind your debt. Once you have the name of your servicer, you can use that information to sign into your account and begin making payments.

Find out your current balance: Thanks to interest, your loan balance could grow while you’re in school. If you’re unsure what amount you owe, your credit report will list the current balance on your loans.

Where to Get Your Free Credit Report

There are many services that will send your credit report for a fee. However, paying for your credit report is unnecessary. You can get a free credit report from each of the three credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — once a year from AnnualCreditReport.com.

It’s a good idea to stagger your credit reports throughout the year. For example, you could review one credit report from each agency every four months. That way, you can continually review your credit report for issues, rather than waiting a full 12 months. Catching problems early can save you money and protect your credit.

You can also check your credit scores for free on Credit.com. They’re updated regularly and can help you spot changes in your credit reports if they go up or down unexpectedly.

What to Do If There’s an Error

An essential part of checking your credit report is reviewing it for errors. Sometimes loans are reported incorrectly or, in cases of identity theft, fraudulent accounts can be put under your name.

If you find an issue, whether it’s a simple mistake or a more serious issue of theft or fraud, it’s important to take action right away. If the accounts in error become delinquent, those late payments can cause your credit report and score to plummet. That will make it more difficult for you to get a loan, a new credit card or get approved for a new apartment. The longer you wait to act, the longer it could take to correct.

To report a problem, write a letter disputing the errors and send it in the mail to the following:

You should also notify the bank or financial institution that reported the error. Include copies of any supporting evidence you may have to prove your case.

To ensure you have a record of contacting the organizations, it’s a good idea to send the letter as certified mail as proof.

If you report the error and the credit bureaus and financial institutions do not fix the issue, you can escalate the problem to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Managing Your Credit

Graduating from college is a huge milestone, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed managing your student loans. From figuring out who your loan servicer is to learning how much your loans grew, the process can be complex.

Getting your credit report and credit scores and reviewing them thoroughly can help you keep track of your loans and stay current on your payments.

Image: g-stockstudio

Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Sign up for our Credit Report Card and receive the latest tips & advice from our team of 50+ credit and money experts as well as a FREE Credit Score and action plan. Sign up now.

Kat Tretina is a contributor to Student Loan Hero who writes about student loan repayment, side hustles, and other personal finance topics. Her work has appeared in publications like the Huffington Post, Money Magazine, Business Insider, and more. See below for her most recent articles.

Comments on articles and responses to those comments are not provided or commissioned by a bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by a bank advertiser. It is not a bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

Please note that our comments are moderated, so it may take a little time before you see them on the page. Thanks for your patience.

Certain credit cards and other financial products mentioned in this and other sponsored content on Credit.com are Partners with Credit.com. Credit.com receives compensation if our users apply for and ultimately sign up for any financial products or cards offered.

Hello, Reader!

Thanks for checking out Credit.com. We hope you find the site and the journalism we produce useful. We wanted to take some time to tell you a bit about ourselves.

Our People

The Credit.com editorial team is staffed by a team of editors and reporters, each with many years of financial reporting experience. We’ve worked for places like the New York Times, American Banker, Frontline, TheStreet.com, Business Insider, ABC News, NBC News, CNBC and many others. We also employ a few freelancers and more than 50 contributors (these are typically subject matter experts from the worlds of finance, academia, politics, business and elsewhere).

Our Reporting

We take great pains to ensure that the articles, video and graphics you see on Credit.com are thoroughly reported and fact-checked. Each story is read by two separate editors, and we adhere to the highest editorial standards. We’re not perfect, however, and if you see something that you think is wrong, please email us at editorial team [at] credit [dot] com,

The Credit.com editorial team is committed to providing our readers and viewers with sound, well-reported and understandable information designed to inform and empower. We won’t tell you what to do. We will, however, do our best to explain the consequences of various actions, thereby arming you with the information you need to make decisions that are in your best interests. We also write about things relating to money and finance we think are interesting and want to share.

In addition to appearing on Credit.com, our articles are syndicated to dozens of other news sites. We have more than 100 partners, including MSN, ABC News, CBS News, Yahoo, Marketwatch, Scripps, Money Magazine and many others. This network operates similarly to the Associated Press or Reuters, except we focus almost exclusively on issues relating to personal finance. These are not advertorial or paid placements, rather we provide these articles to our partners in most cases for free. These relationships create more awareness of Credit.com in general and they result in more traffic to us as well.

Our Business Model

Credit.com’s journalism is largely supported by an e-commerce business model. Rather than rely on revenue from display ad impressions, Credit.com maintains a financial marketplace separate from its editorial pages. When someone navigates to those pages, and applies for a credit card, for example, Credit.com will get paid what is essentially a finder’s fee if that person ends up getting the card. That doesn’t mean, however, that our editorial decisions are informed by the products available in our marketplace. The editorial team chooses what to write about and how to write about it independently of the decisions and priorities of the business side of the company. In fact, we maintain a strict and important firewall between the editorial and business departments. Our mission as journalists is to serve the reader, not the advertiser. In that sense, we are no different from any other news organization that is supported by ad revenue.

Visitors to Credit.com are also able to register for a free Credit.com account, which gives them access to a tool called The Credit Report Card. This tool provides users with two free credit scores and a breakdown of the information in their Experian credit report, updated twice monthly. Again, this tool is entirely free, and we mention that frequently in our articles, because we think that it’s a good thing for users to have access to data like this. Separate from its educational value, there is also a business angle to the Credit Report Card. Registered users can be matched with products and services for which they are most likely to qualify. In other words, if you register and you find that your credit is less than stellar, Credit.com won’t recommend a high-end platinum credit card that requires an excellent credit score You’d likely get rejected, and that’s no good for you or Credit.com. You’d be no closer to getting a product you need, there’d be a wasted inquiry on your credit report, and Credit.com wouldn’t get paid. These are essentially what are commonly referred to as "targeted ads" in the world of the Internet. Despite all of this, however, even if you never apply for any product, the Credit Report Card will remain free, and none of this will impact how the editorial team reports on credit and credit scores.

Your Stories

Lastly, much of what we do is informed by our own experiences as well as the experiences of our readers. We want to tell your stories if you’re interested in sharing them. Please email us at story ideas [at] credit [dot] com with ideas or visit us on Facebook or Twitter.